Across the political spectrum, the first reactions to the news of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords’ shooting Saturday were horror and grief. For many in the tea party movement, another reaction quickly followed: Don’t try blaming this on us, too.

The populist conservative movement – which exploded across the political landscape in 2009 in angry opposition to what activists saw as the overreaching big government agenda pushed by President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats – has from the beginning struggled to debunk a storyline that its fiery rhetoric pushed followers towards violence.

So when details emerged after Gifford’s shooting that seemed to further that narrative– tea party protestors had followed her to events, her office had been vandalized soon after she voted for last year’s Democratic healthcare overhaul, her sobbing father identified “the whole tea party tea party” as her enemy and the shooting suspect had left a social media trail of anti-government sentiments – tea partiers and their allies knew what to do.

The Tucson Tea Party quickly searched its email list and membership rolls and found no record of any participation in the group by Jared Loughner, the suspect in the shootings, which left six people dead and 14 wounded, including Giffords, who was fighting for her life on Sunday afternoon.

“I know our people and there’s nobody that would fit the profile that would do something like this, especially since we knew right away that many people had been shot,” Trent Humphries, co-founder of the Tucson Tea Party and a frequent critic of Giffords, told POLITICO. “This was obviously somebody who was crazy. To shoot someone anyway is crazy, but to do it indiscriminately like that, you knew that there was something else attached to this.”

Nonetheless, accusations of political motivation quickly dominated a rancorous national debate about the shootings, with liberalspointing the finger at the tea party movement and its heroes, including Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, and conservatives accusing liberals and the media of irresponsibly politicizing the shootings while ignoring evidence they said proved the shooter was not one of them and may, in fact, have had more in common with left-wing extremists.

And in this debate the tea party is in some ways haunted by the vandalism and threats of violence directed not just at Giffords but many other Democratic members of Congress who supported last year’s healthcare overhaul, which became the tea party’s top issue.

At the time, tea party leaders quickly condemned those incidents, disputed suggestions their activists were involved, and asserted they completely contradicted the ethos of the movement.

DeAnn Hatch, co-founder with Humphries of the Tucson Tea Party, said she doubted that anyone affiliated with the movement was involved in the smashing of Gifford’s district office door soon after the healthcare vote.

“I wouldn’t say it was a tea partier,” she told POLITICO Saturday night. “It could have been kids. Kids skateboard down there.”

Humphries also contended that the man who dropped a gun at a 2009 Giffords constituent event was not one of them, telling the Arizona Daily Star then that, “Nobody is threatening Gabby … But she does need to get in front of her constituents and answer to her constituents.”

Humphries described the Giffords shooting, which occurred outside a supermarket about three blocks from his home and claimed one of his neighbors, as “horrifying” and inconsistent with the tea party ethos.

But he said he realized even before his shock wore off, that critics on the left would try to pin the shooting on the tea party, and that the movement would figure prominently into the media’s coverage of the tragedy.

“That was our first thought after who shot her,” he said. “Every time anything happens, we’re going to get blamed,” he said, arguing that liberals and reporters should be held accountable when they suggest links between the tea party and bad actors.

Aware of the knock against the movement, the Tucson group routinely sends emails to its membership cautioning them to behave themselves, and has been retaining security help for all its events, according to Humphreys.

That reflects the effort that other conservative activists, operatives, thought-leaders and politicians made in the run-up to the November elections to eradicate the perception that the tea party was prone to violence, or awash in fringe elements likely to repel the independent voters who decide elections, such as the anti-Semitic white supremacist group to which Loughner may have been linked.

Tea party leaders urged members not to carry incendiary signs like those that appeared at some protests deploying imagery of Hitler and the Holocaust to express opposition to Obama and the healthcare overhaul, or to question President Barack Obama’s eligibility to be president. The goal of the fringe clampdown was to deprive Democrats and opponents on the left of a potentially potent weapon.

But according to influenteial conservative blogger Erick Erickson, the GOP’s landslide victories in the November midterm elections proved the tea party’s effectiveness working within the system,

Erickson said Sunday that any efforts by the left and the media to rehash the allegations of harassment and to tie them to the Giffords shooting are craven, irresponsible and “may very well incite violence against the right.”

“The tea party movement won in November. Winners don’t go on shooting sprees,” he declared, adding that Loughner was “crazy and evil,” but was “very clearly not of the tea party movement, not a Dittohead, not led by Sarah Palin, me, or anyone else on the right.”

Seconding Erickson, Keith Appell, an executive at a top Washington conservative public relations firm, emailed reporters to point out “in all the writings and videos uncovered so far, Jared Lee Loughner never mentioned the health care bill or its repeal, never mentioned the Tea Party, never mentioned talk-radio.”

In fact, conservatives pointed out a long list of favorite books Loughner included on a YouTube profile contained few suggestions that he was an adherent to tea party or conservative orthodoxy.

Judging by that list, a blogger on the conservative website American Thinker concluded that “with the possible exception of Ayn Rand’s ‘We The Living’,” Loughner’s reading material suggests he leans left, including “some gentle liberal favorites like To Kill A Mockingbird, hippie cult hits like Siddartha and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and that ultimate left wing classic, the Communist Manifesto.”

Conservatives also seized on a YouTube video he liked of a person dressed as a terrorist burning the American flag and tweets posted after the shooting by someone who claimed to have known Loughner asserting he was “left wing, quite liberal. & oddly obsessed with the 2012 prophecy.”

The evidence was enough for the popular conservative blog Gateway Pundit to conclude Loughner was “definitely NOT a tea partier,” but rather a “Left-Winger” who “likes watching U.S. flags burn” and whose “favorite book is Communist Manifesto.”

The debate over which side of the political fringe owned Loughner followed a pattern similar to the skirmishes after the discovery of anti-government writings left behind by extremists who in separate incidents last year flew a plane into an Austin, Texas, IRS building and engaged police in a shoot out at the Pentagon.

Conservatives highlighted the IRS suicide pilot’s criticisms of Congress for failing to reform the healthcare system, and his channeling of Marxism. And they noted that the Pentagon shooter – despite his libertarian-infused riffs against the American monetary system and “far-reaching violation of property rights” – had registered to vote as a Democrat and was seemed more hostile to the Republican administration of former President George W. Bush (suggesting it may have played a role in the Sept. 11 attacks) than to Obama’s.

“Don’t Believe the MSM: John Patrick Bedell, the Pentagon Shooter, was no Right-Winger,” blared a headline at the conservative media watchdog website Big Journalism.

“First the guy in Austin and now the Pentagon shooter,” Erickson tweeted after the latter event, in March. “Why are leftwing nuts trying to kill more than babies, their usual target?”

And he expressed doubt that there’s anything tea partiers can do to reverse the storyline, “short of having every tea party activist in the nation turn in their guns and declare themselves as adherents to Gandhi’s non-violence” principles.

But according to George Lakoff, a professor of linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley, there is no question that extreme rhetoric on the right could have pushed Loughner to violence. “Even crazies get their ideas from somewhere,” he wrote in a Sunday contribution to POLITICO’s Arena.

“Violent political encounters and the language of violence activate the idea of violence. Ideas are physically there in the brain. People act on what is in their brains.”

And though Giffords seemed to downplay the risks to her own safety during the heated healthcare debate, she nonetheless seemed to warn during an eerily prescient March interview of political violence.
“You look at these examples around the country, which really try to incite people and inflame emotions, then chances are they’re going to have a couple people, extremes on both sides, frankly,” Giffords said, not finishing her thought.

“Most of the country is in the middle, but we do have these polarized parts of our parties that really get excited and that’s where again, community leaders, not just the political leaders, but all of us need to come together and say, OK, there’s a fine line here.”